Hammer Projects: Gê Viana
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Gê Viana is a visual artist working in collage, sound, video, and installation to explore material culture, oral history, and syncretism within the African diaspora across Brazil. Viana's practice moves between domestic, urban, and rural spaces and blends analog and digital forms of collage with painting and early twentieth-century photographic processes. Her work challenges the accuracies of traditional archives, filling the gaps sustained by institutional memory with evocative images and sounds that illustrate the fullness of Afro-Brazilian identity and heritage. Through her multidisciplinary practice, Viana uplifts the history, traditions, and dignity of her communities.
For her Hammer Project, Viana will present an installation and new sculpture, including her short film Radiola de promessa (Radio of promise, 2025). The film documents quotidian life in deep rural parts of her home state, Maranhão, in northeast Brazil. In Radiola de promessa, the body is like a repertoire of ancestral African rhythms, songs, dances, and memories that remixes the past with the present. Faith, sound, and belonging coalesce at the heart of this work as Viana explores the ways in which reggae music weaves together the cultural memory of the land in Maranhão.
Hammer Projects: Gê Viana will be the artist’s first institutional presentation in the United States.
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![A man and woman embrace in front of a wall of yellow speakers, surrounded by smoke]()
Gê Viana, Radiola de promessa, 2025 (still)Single-channel video, color, sound. 13:07 min. Courtesy of the artist and Mitre Galeria
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![A woman in a white dress dances in front of a wall of yellow speakers, surrounded by smoke]()
Gê Viana, Radiola de promessa, 2025 (still)Single-channel video, color, sound. 13:07 min. Courtesy of the artist and Mitre Galeria
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![A wall of yellow speakers, surrounded by smoke]()
Radiola de promessaSingle-channel video, color, sound. 13:07 min. Courtesy of the artist and Mitre Galeria
Hammer Projects: Gê Viana is organized by Erin Christovale, curator, with Azul Silverio, curatorial assistant.
Hammer Projects is presented in memory of Tom Slaughter and with support from the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation. Lead funding is provided by the Hammer Collective. Generous support is provided by Susan Bay Nimoy and Leonard Nimoy, with additional support from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture.
All exhibitions at the Hammer are made possible by the Hammer Exhibition Fund. Lead support is provided by Alice and Nahum Lainer. Generous support is provided by Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein, Christine Meleo Bernstein and Armyan Bernstein, and Bill Hair.